a little privacy

No notions of family democracy or children’s liberation troubled Edwardian parents. An unwritten contract operated, much like that between master and servant. Parents provided food, clothing and shelter as best they could; in return, child owed respect and unquestioning obedience until they set up homes of their own. Parents of all classes equally demanded respect. A London packing-case maker recalled that he wanted his children to behave "in a deferential sort of a way, you know. We’ve got to be respected", and a Nottingham man put a typical view. "They were your father and mother—you respected them as mother and father, aye. "
    Although providing for the family was primarily the parents’ job, they did not consider it wrong, in hard times, to ask the children to help. Many children did not need to be asked, but found their own pennies in the many ways then open to them before they left school: catching rats for two pence each, selling postcards at the Liverpool docks at a penny for six, running errands, scrubbing steps, minding babies. At 13 or 14 these children would expect to hand over their first full-time earnings to their parents.
    Decency, respectability and cleanliness—these, with honesty, were the virtues most parents tried to inculcate was their part of the contract. There was not much time and energy, even given the inclination, to provide more spiritual frills. That was left to the Sunday school teachers and, to a lesser extent, the elementary school. Middle-class parents were not such solid supporters of Sunday school. They preferred to give their children religious instruction themselves, and their larger houses and their servants gave them more respite from their children’s company—one of the uses of Sunday school was to give parents a little privacy on Sunday afternoons.
    How far was affection considered a parental duty? The relationship between a parent and a sick child would usually be tender. Much loves and care was devoted to children in those days before anti-biotics, when children illnesses could be very serious—diphtheria was still common—and careful, patient nursing was something all parents could give.
    When mothers of none of more children had to work full-time as well, a great deal of work fell on their daughters, particularly the older ones. Unlike their brothers, who although they worked hard at getting money often had the fun and companionship of other boys, these girls working closely with their mothers had no time to go out and felt particularly deprived. And when the mother felt that the father was not helping enough financially, perhaps spending his money in the pub, her resentment shut her off from her children. And yet too many children and too little money and time cannot have been the only factors inhibi-ting the flow of affection from mother to child. In families of three children or fewer, and in well-to-do families, some parents are also remembered as reserved and unapproachable, sometimes going so far as to repulse a caress or hug.
    So universally effective was the belief that children should respect and obey parents that many children remember being given corporal punishment only once. A significant minority, mainly in rural families, recall childhood free from any punishment at all. But the absence of resort to punishment was not permissiveness. Obedience was enforced while the child remained under the parental roof. With certain exceptions, girls were expected to be home by 10 o’clock and some parents insisted on earlier hours. Courting boy friends were expected to leave at the time decreed and to bring the girl friend back to her parents in time.
    One elderly woman, Mrs. Hailsell, remembers how her usually mild father reacted when at the age of 17 she came in from the pictures half an hour after her regulation 9 o’clock curfew:"Tll give you 10 o’clock at night! Get up those stairs — you go out no more this week’. And I was so surprised when he hit me with his slipper that I turned round and got another one. "
    Sons might be allowed a little more freedom but their fathers should usually ask when they expected to be in.
    For some brought up in this period the habits of filial duty lasted for the whole of their lifetime.